


The Great No

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Torture, Missing Scene, Moral Ambiguity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 09:32:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1423456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They aren’t good people anymore. Jean doesn’t think he can handle it. Armin convinces him he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great No

**Author's Note:**

> _For some people the day comes_   
>  _when they have to declare the great Yes_   
>  _or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes_   
>  _ready within him; and saying it,_
> 
> _he goes forward in honor and self-assurance._   
>  _He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,_   
>  _he would still say no. Yet that No—the right No—_   
>  _undermines him all his life._
> 
> _— Constantine P. Cavafy,_ “Che fece...il gran rifiuto”  
>   
>  Many thanks to [Smillaraaq](http://archiveofourown.org/users/smillaraaq) for her fine beta work and also to [Cordialcount](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount) for additional review.

The first howl out of Sanes hits them all like a shockwave: Almost in unison the seven of them sit up straight, as if someone above them had yanked up all their Gear wires at once. It’s almost comical, Armin thinks. Except that it’s really, really not. His stomach lurches with a slow rolling motion, and an icicle presses against his nape and drips down his spine.

At first Sanes’s yells are separate, discrete things. Then they’re connected by bubbling sobs and wet-sounding gasps. Eventually they merge into one long, desperate wail that wavers in pitch but not in volume. Nobody can sleep with that going on. They can barely talk over it.

Jean puts his head into his hands. “This isn’t why I joined the Corps,” he mutters. “Why did we have to get involved in this?”

“We didn’t have a choice. We _don’t_ have a choice. If we fail, humanity will be wiped out.” Though Eren looks as earnest as always, there’s a strange flatness to his voice. Armin wonders if Eren is totally convinced of what he’s saying.

“We’re already rebels now.” Sasha’s voice sounds like a rope frayed to the breaking point. “What happens if we fail?”

“We’ll be hanged in front of everyone,” Jean says, voice muffled behind his hands.

“Then we don’t fail,” Mikasa says. As if it were as simple as that.

Armin leans forward on his folded arms and exhales. Sometimes, if you throw ideas out to people drowning in fear, they can latch onto them like rafts. 

“See,” he begins, “the problem is that we’re trying to change a system that hasn’t changed at all since it was founded a hundred years ago. There are no precedents to follow, so I’ve been trying to come up with strategies. Maybe we could try to get the people on our side. All the repeated titan attacks leave them afraid and confused. We could take advantage of it by shifting the blame onto the monarchy. That might go well.”

Now they’re all looking at him intently, and he might even see a glimmer of hope in this eye or that. He adds, “The problem with that, though, is that if they rise up against the king, that puts them in danger. But… I don’t think that can be helped. We’re doing this for the sake of humanity, we can’t really hesitate.”

Later he realizes he shouldn’t have looked down at the table to put his next thought together. “We could cause a major accident and make it look as though the monarchy or the MPs were responsible for it. If we can be seen rescuing some of the victims, and then we get ‘the truth’ out about how the accident ‘really’ happened, the public will view the Survey Corps as their saviors. Not like it’d be hard to fool the public. Shit…”

Suddenly he looks up. Half a dozen faces are staring at him as though he’s just suggested catapulting babies over the Walls to feed the titans on the other side.

He forces a grin that feels about as genuine as a plaster mask over his face. “Come on, guys! I’m just joking!”

Jean’s looking at him almost the way he looked at Reiner and Bertholdt for the first time after he learned they were traitors. “That old pervert really broke something in you, didn’t he?” he finally blurts, going brick-red as he turns his head away.

Armin stares blankly at him. He hadn’t _liked_ being groped like that, but once it was all over he’d put it out of mind. Jean seems to have taken it harder than he himself did. Maybe it was harder for Jean to witness and be able to do nothing than for Armin to endure. If it had actually happened to Historia, Armin admits, he’d probably be feeling much like Jean’s feeling now.

“Nah, Armin’s always been good at coming up with that kind of thing,” Eren mutters. There’s no anger or disgust in it, just the same weary matter-of-factness.

“That’s not the Armin I remember bringing up.” Mikasa says. She doesn’t sound angry, either, but there’s a wariness to her voice. Maybe a kind of admiration too. Or maybe Armin’s imagining it.

“Well… “ He’s regathered his thoughts. “Look at it this way. We’re already criminals, so we have nothing to lose. We’ve got to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we might have to kill not to avoid being eaten, but because the people we kill don’t agree with us. Or maybe we won’t even know that, but we’ll have to kill them because they’re in a different corps and we can’t take the risk of trusting them.”

And then the realization hits him hard, and he stares down at the table again, because all of a sudden he can’t meet anyone else’s eyes.

“We’re not good people anymore,” he says softly.

They’re all silent for a good minute. The only sound in the room is Sanes bellowing from behind the closed door. Then Jean abruptly stands up so fast that his chair overturns. He doesn’t bother to right it, just heads for the back door.

Sasha gets to her feet as the door slams. Armin grabs her wrist. “Let me deal with him,” he says.

“He ain’t gonna want to talk to you,” she exclaims, glaring at him.

“Yeah, I know,” he replies. “But I owe it to him.”

She doesn’t stop glaring at Armin, but she sits back down.

The house they’re holed up in is in the middle of nowhere, yet the small back porch looks out over a courtyard with high walls around it. The courtyard’s big enough for two pairs of people to spar in at any given time. Armin assumes Erwin picked the spot because of the windowless interior room, but he wonders if the opportunity for all of them to work off tension without threat of attack factored into the decision.

Jean’s sitting on the decking of the porch with his arms around his knees and his head down. Armin closes the kitchen door behind him, which both mutes Sanes’s yelling and occludes it with the sound of crickets. His shoulders sag a little with relief at the auditory reprieve.

Jean looks up at the sound of the door, sees Armin standing there, and turns his head away again without saying anything. Armin settles next to him, maybe fifteen centimeters away, not touching him or even looking at him. 

Instead he stares straight out into the courtyard, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. The night’s been relatively mild, and the smells of loam and greenery float on the air. Fireflies dance in the blackness like heavy raindrops off flat stone, and he can make out the wobbling outlines of bats in flight. Sitting there is almost pleasant, other than that there’s a guy being tortured a few doors away.

“‘Just joking,’ my ass,” Jean snarls, his head still averted. “You’re a goddamn monster. No wonder you and Eren are such good buds.”

There’s a cold spurt of shock under Armin’s ribs, but he says nothing, just waits him out. Long minutes pass. Finally Jean turns his head back toward Armin. His features are no more than outlined in the faint light coming from under the kitchen door. He doesn’t look angry or repulsed now, just beaten and bitter.

“So I guess I’m a monster now, too.” He barks out a short laugh and stares off into the courtyard. “I signed up to fight them. Not to _join_ them.”

“Eh, it didn’t sound to me like anyone was enthused by the accident idea,” Armin says self-deprecatingly.

“If you ran it by Commander Erwin he’d probably take you up on it, and then none of us would have a choice about it. But even if you didn’t, who the fuck knows what else we might be asked to do.” Jean swallows loudly, and when he next speaks there’s an edge of tears to his voice. “God almighty, Armin. _I don’t want to have to be in that room, ever._ Even if all they wanted was someone to just hand over the... whatever they’re using.”

Armin doubts they’d ever make Jean, of all of them, be in that room. They don’t need him falling apart on them. But he doesn’t say it, because that’s not the point. Not entirely. 

Instead he says, “At first you were gonna join the MPs, Jean. Sanes and the other MP tortured Pastor Nick to death. How do you know you wouldn’t have been ordered to help with that? Hurting people not for the good of humanity, but to keep yourself comfortable and in power.”

Jean’s mouth twists. Armin’s hit a nerve, and it’s confirmed when Jean’s voice hardens again and he changes the subject. “ _You’d_ be in that room in a second if they told you to. Wouldn’t you?”

In one of the old books Armin found years ago, there was a bit about humanity having once come up with a law making soldiers duty-bound to refuse monstrous orders. The first thing he wondered about upon reading it was how the lawmakers accounted for the times when _not_ following such orders would turn out to be more disastrous than following them.

He says nothing again.

“There’s my answer, I guess,” Jean mutters.

Armin feels slightly abashed. Jean’s question deserves an honest reply, and he thinks about it for a moment.

“If I were ordered to do something like that,” he says, “and it seemed to me that the outcome would be worse if I didn’t, I’d go ahead and do it. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I’d do it. If the outcome would be better overall if I refused…” He breathes in deeply. “I hope I’d have the courage to say, ‘No, go ahead and kill me right here for insubordination, because I can’t do that.’“

“But how the hell would you _know,_ Armin?” Jean demands. “They don’t tell us everything we need to know. They just expect us to trust them.”

Armin thinks for another second, then says, “There’s a limit to that. You remember Levi telling Eren that he wasn’t wrong to want to shift into titan form to help out Petra and the rest of the squad? And that Levi couldn’t make that decision for him?”

“Yeah. But Eren _didn’t_ shift, did he? And Petra and the rest of the squad died. So what’s your point?”

“My point is that at least one of our officers was willing to leave a massive decision in the hands of an ordinary Corps member. And that he didn’t punish Eren later on for having made what turned out to be the wrong decision — didn’t even hold it against him, even though he lost his whole squad because of it.” Eren had told him and Mikasa about that conversation with Levi.

Jean scowls. “I dunno. It’s kind of a personal decision, isn’t it, whether to shift like that? I mean, when it _is_ a decision, instead of something that just happens without the person’s control. Not the same thing as deciding whether or not to obey an order to torture someone or kill them for wearing a different uniform, is it?”

“Why not? Erwin and Levi saved Eren’s life just so they could use him as a weapon, didn’t they? What good is a weapon with its own ideas about how you should use it?”

Jean says nothing for a while. Even in the dim, Armin can watch his thought processes like he’s watching gears move in a clock. Finally he looks at Armin again and says, “So they trust us. That means they also trust that we’ll be able to kill people. Maybe decide on our own that we have to kill them, without being commanded to do it.”

“Yes,” Armin says.

Jean lowers his face onto his arms again. Armin waits. He watches the bats and thinks they look like drunkards trying to maneuver in Gear. An owl calls from somewhere beyond the courtyard walls.

“I guess I better get used to it,” Jean says. His voice is barely audible, even in the quiet, and there’s no affect to it at all. And then he laughs. It’s not entirely without bitterness, but there’s something soft and longing in it, too.

“You know, Marco used to tell me I had the makings of a leader. Because I’m weak, he said, and so I can understand other weak people and convince them to do what’s necessary. And he wasn’t giving me a back-handed compliment. He was totally sincere about it.”

Armin blinks. Jean hasn’t spoken of Marco in a long time, not since the last few days of Trost, when his body walked around piling corpses into wagons and onto pyres while Jean himself seemed entirely absent. 

“I don’t think you’re weak,” Armin says, and he’s being honest. “I’m the one who froze up on that rooftop in Trost. You’re the one who got everyone into HQ.”

Jean’s looking down at his feet now, and his voice is low. He sounds almost more like he’s talking to himself than to Armin. “We had to get into HQ. We didn’t have any other choices, not good ones, anyway. What do you do when _all_ your choices suck? By which I don’t mean that one of them sucks significantly less than the others, but that they’re all really awful? How the fuck do you lead if you can’t figure out which to pick, let alone make yourself do it?”

After a moment, Armin says, “I guess it’s like Levi told Eren. You make a decision and you stick with it. You won’t be able to tell whether it’s right or wrong until there’s an outcome. In the meantime, all you can do is believe, as strongly as you can, that you won’t regret it.”

Jean says nothing. Armin thinks that if he were sitting here with Eren instead, he might put his arm around him, or just rest his hand on his shoulder. Maybe Sasha or Connie could have done that with Jean. But Armin remains still.

More time passes. Dawn’s going to break soon, and they’re not wearing cloaks over their shirts and trousers. Armin says, “I’m getting chilled. Feel like going back in?”

Jean shakes his head. “I’m fine. I dunno if I can go back to listening to… to _that_ right now. I need a little more time out here, alone.”

“Sure.” Armin stands and stretches, then turns for the door.

“Armin.” 

He turns around again to see Jean looking at him. 

“Thanks,” Jean says tonelessly.

“Sure,” Armin says again, and opens the kitchen door. Both of them flinch at the muffled yell that ripples out from behind another closed door into the peaceful night.


End file.
